Stephen Witt: ‘Music piracy is illegal – but morally, is it wrong?’

Kitty Empire talks to Stephen Witt about his eagerly awaited book charting the rise of the MP3 file, the online pirates who exploited it and the record industry that ignored its cultural impact until it was far too lateExtract: Going for a song: the hidden history of music piracy How Music Got Free is in essence the gripping tale of three men: Karlheinz Brandenburg, the German scientist whose lab cobbled together the MP3; Doug Morris, the old-school record company executive who presided over the rap boom and began the fight-back against piracy; and Bennie Lydell “Dell” Glover, the North Carolina CD pressing plant worker, whose light fingers and computer skills singlehandedly led to a haemorrhage of A-list rock and hip-hop releases – Eminem, Kanye West, Queens of the Stone Age, Björk – being freely available on the internet two weeks before release.The three men never met, but Witt reveals how their lives overlapped and irrevocably changed those of anyone who listens to music. Brandenburg’s genius lay in shrinking sound files down so that they could easily be sent over the internet, back when most files were huge and modems still dialled up. Owing to the bitter internecine rivalries within acoustic engineering, no one recognised the scope of Brandenburg’s technology; the inferior MP2 kept winning industry accolades and commercial applications. Universal executive Morris presided over an industry rich from the obscene profits generated by CD sales, until the secretive... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2015-06-07 00:00:00 UTC ]

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In music, imprisoned Jews found comfort, dignity and sometimes a lifeline

Kellie D. Brown writes that music brought some hope to Nazi concentration camps. Continue reading at The Washington Post

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The Music and the Mirror

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How Stephen Miller went from teen troll to Trump whisperer

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Amazon Charts: Stephen Hawking soars into the stratosphere

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Stephen King novel Later to be released by Hard Case Crime

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Selby to spearhead music publishing imprint for Bonnier Books UK

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Lana Del Rey will release her poetry collection as an audiobook set to Jack Antonoff music. (Same.)

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Hachette partners with Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust on career toolkit

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Deezer launches music pairings for International Booker Prize shortlist

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Templar raises the roof with Jack Pepper's musical exploration

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Grisham, Child, Amazon, PRH Headline Lawsuit of KISS Library for Piracy

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What’s gone wrong in America? An outsider explains.

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Koji wants to do for games, memes, and selfies what TikTok did for music

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No one stood trial for the El Bordo mine fire. Yuri Herrera’s ‘A Silent Fury’ tries to right a century-old wrong.

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‘Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why’ takes hilarious aim at the current administration. But it’s not all fun and games.

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Michael Joseph to release Stephen Fry's Troy this October

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The man who made Indian classical music mainstream

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